A Versailles Christmas-Tide eBook

Through the Royal salons flits a presence whereat
the shades of the Royal Princesses look askance:
that of the frolicsome, good-natured, irresponsible
Du Barry. A soulless ephemera she, with no ambitions
or aspirations, save that, having quitted the grub
stage, she desires to be as brilliant a butterfly
as possible. Close in attendance on her moves
an ebon shadow—­Zamora, the ingrate foundling
who, reared by the Duchesse, swore that he would make
his benefactress ascend the scaffold, and kept his
oath. For our last sight of the prodigal, warm-hearted
Du Barry, plaything of the aged King, is on the guillotine,
where in agonies of terror she fruitlessly appeals
to her executioner’s clemency.

But of all the bygone dames who haunt the grand Chateau,
the only one I detest is probably the most irreproachable
of all—­Madame de Maintenon. There
is something so repulsively sanctimonious in her aspect,
something so crafty in the method wherewith, under
the cloak of religion, she wormed her way into high
places, ousting—­always in the name of propriety—­those
who had helped her. Her stepping-stone to Royal
favour was handsome, impetuous Madame de Montespan,
who, taking compassion on her widowed poverty, appointed
Madame Scarron, as she then was, governess of her
children, only to find her protegee usurp her
place both in the honours of the King and in the affections
of their children.

The natural heart rebels against the “unco guid,”
and Madame de Maintenon, with her smooth expression,
double chin, sober garments and ever-present symbols
of piety, revolts me. I know it is wrong.
I know that historians laud her for the wholesome
influence she exercised upon the mind of a king who
had grown timorous with years; that the dying Queen
declared that she owed the King’s kindness to
her during the last twenty years of her life entirely
to Madame de Maintenon. But we know also that
six months after the Queen’s death an unwonted
light showed at midnight in the Chapel Royal, where
Madame de Maintenon—­the child of a prison
cell—­was becoming the legal though unacknowledged
wife of Louis XIV. The impassioned, uncalculating
de Montespan had given the handsome Monarch her all
without stipulation. Truly the career of Madame
de Maintenon was a triumph of virtue over vice; and
yet of all that heedless, wanton throng, my soul detests
only her.

[Illustration: Where the Queen Played]

CHAPTER VIII

MARIE ANTOINETTE

Stereotyped sights are rarely the most engrossing.
At the Palace of Versailles the petits appartements
de la Reine, those tiny rooms whose grey old-world
furniture might have been in use yesterday, to me hold
more actuality than all the regal salons in whose vast
emptiness footsteps reverberate like echoes from the
past.

In the pretty sitting-room the coverings to-day are
a reproduction of the same pale blue satin that draped
the furniture in the days when queens preferred the
snug seclusion of those dainty rooms overlooking the
dank inner courtyard to the frigid grandeur of their
State chambers. Therein it was that Marie Leczinska
was wont to instruct her young daughters in the virtues
as she had known them in her girlhood’s thread-bare
home, not as her residence at the profligate French
Court had taught her to understand them.